The most disarming part of Patrick Wallingford's first meeting with the love of his life is the order in which she removes her clothes. That she is the donor of what will be Wallingford's new left hand or, rather, the donor's widow, is less astonishing to him than that Doris Clausen removes her trousers and knickers before her top. For a few moments she is naked only from the waist down.

Wallingford rightly discerns this is the wrong, and a distinctly unflattering way to disrobe. Such vigorous and humorous sexual moments abound in The Fourth Hand, although Wallingford, the protagonist, is a sexual acquiescer rather than an adventurer.

The Fourth Hand begins with the loss of Wallingford's hand in an accident: 'Imagine a young man on his way to a less-than-30-second event - the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age.'

Wallingford is a reporter for a news network with a penchant for the catastrophic. He is interviewing a lion tamer at a circus in India when he puts his microphone too close to the cage, resulting in millions viewing his hand being torn off and eaten by the lions.

Irving has a literary style similar to a snowball effect: with each novel he creates symbols and develops themes to accompany those he has already accumulated. Grief, loss, abortion, amputation, sex, children, America's political history and the power of foresight are all are explored here.

But The Fourth Hand is essentially character driven, and the novel is brimming with extraordinary characters some of whose eccentricities may be unnecessary.

It is a quibble: in writing A Prayer For Owen Meany Irving produced a hard act to follow and his latest work still towers above most fiction, if not its own predecessor.